Gardenvisit.com

Saana Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery

The Saana Pavilion would be EVEN more beautiful with water and bamboos, instead of white chippings and trad flower pots

The Saana Pavilion is the most beautiful, so far, in the Serpentine Galleries series of Summer Pavilions, but it is a disappointment for no fault of the architects. Obviously, it should have been integrated with an equally brilliant garden design.

The Online Etymology Dictionary has this for Pavilion: 1297, “large, stately tent,” from O.Fr. paveillun (12c.), from L. papilionem (nom. papilio) “tent,” lit. “butterfly,” on resemblance of wings. Of unknown origin. Meaning “open building in a park, etc., used for shelter or entertainment” is attested from 1687. Saana have done the butterfly idea to perfection and it integrates with the plane trees better than any of its predecessors. But it could have been so much beautiful if integrated with, for example, water and bamboos. I hear the pavilion has been sold, so perhaps I will visit a garden some day and find this has been done. I hope so.

My suggestion to the Director and Trustees of the Serpentine Gallery is that they move heaven and earth, in their customary style, to raise additional funding for a combined pavillion+garden and then invite entries from integrated professional teams. This would:

The key words are simplicity and beauty. The simplicity and beauty provide a marriage between the architecture and the formal landscape setting. It is designed in such an astounding way that the design is invisible!

Mies according to Therese O’Malley and Marc Treib in ‘Regional garden design in the United States’ was responsible for a new conception in interior and exterior spatial relationships(p24);

“Emphasising the plane rather than the mass, and reducing the number of firm corners, the architect had effectively effaced the distinction between interior room and exterior courtyard.”

I 200% agree about the Mies van der Rohe pavilion, both regarding its beauty and its influence – and that neither would have been so great if it were not a fabulous combination of indoor and outdoor design http://www.gardenvisit.com/garden/mies_van_der_rohe_pavilion . The world would have better cities if this example had attracted more followers. I don’t know what went wrong. Was it the baleful influence of concrete, Walter Gropius, wartime economy or highway engineers?